Someone laughs at her mishap and it is then that we realise something is going wrong. The Mary Rose was reefing her sails and turning against the wind to get her starboard guns to bear on the French just as the gust of wind caught her. She heels over in the sea, dangerously low, her sails dipping towards the waves, her beautiful square sails no longer proudly upright above her arched decks, but now at an angle, odd and ugly.
‘What are you doing?’ the king bellows, as if anyone can answer him. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
She is like a horse that has taken a curve too tight. You can see a horse with his legs going from under him, running harder and faster, and yet everything happens very slowly, but with a terrible inexorability.
‘Right her!’ Henry howls like a dog, and now everyone is beside him at the castle wall, leaning out as if they will ever hear us shouting instructions. Someone is screaming ‘No! No! No!’ as the beautiful proud ship, her standards still rippling, goes further and further over on her side and then we see her slowly lie on her side like a fallen bird, half in, half out of the scudding waves.
We can’t hear them scream. The sailors are trapped below decks as the water rushes in through the open gunports, and they cannot climb up the narrow ladders in the waist of the ship. They drown in their own coffin as she takes them gently, softly down. We can hear the men on the upper deck. They are clinging to the boarding nets, which are now entrapping them, trying to slash them away. Some of the fighting men jump down from the ship’s turrets and stab with their pikes at the ropes or hack with their swords at the thick net. But they can’t get the men free, can’t open the nets. Our soldiers and sailors die like netted mackerel, struggling to breathe against the mesh.
The free men on top tumble off the castles like so many toy soldiers, like the little lead men that Edward plays with, and their leather jackets drag them down in moments. Those who have helmets feel them fill with cold sea water before they can untie the straps. Thick boots drag their owners down, heavy plate armour strapped on knee and breast plunges men in a rush to the bottom. I can hear a voice crying: ‘No, no, no.’
It feels like a long hour of agony, but perhaps it is only minutes. It feels timeless. The side of the ship seems to rest on the water like a sleepy bird, moving with the sea as a handful of men, no more, fling themselves from the rigging and disappear into the smoke-drenched waves. The roar of the cannon goes on, the battle itself goes on. Nobody but us has frozen in horror to watch as the keel rolls a little more to the sky, as the sails fill with water, not wind, and billow and swell in their strange submerged beauty, and then drag the ship down to the green depths.
I can hear someone weeping: ‘No, no, no.’
COWDRAY HOUSE, MIDHURST, SUSSEX, SUMMER 1545
The battle is inconclusive, they tell me, when the smoke finally clears and the fleets limp their different ways: the French back to France, the English ships into port. They report to the king that England was triumphant. We sent out a few tiny ships against a great French armada, and the French soldiers that landed on the coast of Sussex and the Isle of Wight burned a few barns but were driven off by the farmhands.
‘Englishmen,’ Sir Anthony Denny whispers encouragingly to the king. ‘For God and for Harry!’
But the king is not stirred by the battle cry of an earlier, greater king. He is shocked, his great carcass beached in his bed like his great ship is beached on the seabed, underwater in the Solent. They come almost hourly to tell him that it is not as bad as it seems. They say that they will raise the Mary Rose, that it will be no more than a matter of days before they have hauled her to the surface and pumped out the water. But after a while they stop boasting that she can be reclaimed from the sea, and the beautiful ship and her sailors, and the fighting men – four hundred of them, five hundred, nobody knows how many were enlisted – will be left to the chantry of the tides and the singing of the sea.
As soon as the king can ride we go by stages to Cowdray House at Midhurst, hoping that one of the king’s most boastful courtiers, Sir Anthony Browne, can raise his spirits and comfort him. The king sits on his horse in silence, looking around him, looking everywhere at green fields, strips of crops, flocks of sheep, herds of cows, as if he can see nothing but the heeling over of his proud ship and the terrible gurgle in the water as she sailed downward to drown. I am beside him and I know that my face is frozen like a stone angel on a tomb. The country that we ride through is quiet, the people resentful. They know that the French nearly landed, that the royal fleet cannot defend them. This is a countryside of inlets and tidal rivers, terribly exposed to an invasion. They are afraid that the French will refit and come again, and there are many people who whisper that if the French came and restored the abbeys and the churches and the holy shrines, then they would be a blessing to England.
I do not ask about Thomas Seymour. I do not dare to say his name. I think if I say so much as ‘Thomas’ that I will cry out and if I start, I will never be able to stop. I think there is a sea of tears in me as deep as the tides that sigh through the rigging of his ship.
‘The king has granted Lady Carew a great pension,’ Nan says quietly to me as she is brushing my hair before putting on my gold net and my hood.
‘Lady Carew?’ I ask indifferently.
‘Her husband went down on the ship,’ she says. Nobody says ‘Mary Rose’ any more. It is as if she is a ghost, another lost queen, a nameless woman missing from Henry’s court.
‘Poor lady,’ I say.
‘The king made him vice-admiral the very night before, and gave him the command,’ she says. ‘He replaced Thomas Seymour, who was furious at the slight. He always had the luck of the devil, did Tom. He had to make another ship his flagship and he came through unscathed.’
She looks up from the work of twisting my hair into ringlets and tucking them into the net and sees my face in the mirror. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks. ‘Are you ill?’
I put my hand to my stomacher. I can feel my heart pound through the tightly laced silk. ‘I am sick,’ I whisper. ‘Nan, I am terribly sick. Let me lie down for a moment.’
They all crowd round me and I close my eyes to blot out the sight of the anxious avid faces. Then someone lifts me at my shoulders and two of them bear up my feet and I feel them put me onto my bed. Someone cuts my laces and loosens my stomacher so I can breathe more easily. Nan slips off my silk slippers and chafes my icy feet.
Someone holds a cup of warm ale to my lips and I sip, and then lean back on the pillows and open my eyes.
‘You don’t feel hot,’ one of the ladies volunteers nervously. They are all terrified of the Sweat. It can kill a man in four hours, and there is no easy way to tell if he will die. He complains of heat at dinner and he sweats to death by nightfall. It is a Tudor plague; it came in with this king’s father.
‘I am sick in my belly,’ I say. ‘Something I ate.’
Two of them exchange secret smiles. ‘Oh – do you feel sick in the mornings?’ Anne Seymour says, suggestively, hopefully.
I shake my head. I don’t want this sort of rumour starting. Even now, as I am struggling with the news that Thomas is alive, I have to watch what I say, what they say, what anyone says about me. ‘No,’ I insist, ‘and no-one is to say such a thing. It is not that, and the king would be much displeased if you gossiped about me.’
‘I was just hoping for the best for you,’ Anne defends herself.
I close my eyes. ‘I need to sleep,’ is all I say.
I hear Nan chivy everyone from my room and then the shutting of my bedroom door and the rustle of her dress as she sits beside my bed. Without opening my eyes I reach out my hand and she takes it in her comforting grasp.
‘Such a terrible day,’ I say. ‘I can’t stop seeing it.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Try to sleep.’
GREENWICH PALACE, SUMMER 1545
We make our way back to London in slow stages. The journey, which set out as a summer’s jaunt to see the fleet i
n triumph, crawls home with a king stunned by disappointment, through a fearful countryside. The fields of dark gold wheat and the springing green of the second growth in the hayfields bring us no pleasure as we look at the prosperous manor houses and the little villages and think they are impossible to defend.
We go to Greenwich, where the waves that slap at the stone pier before the palace remind us of the unforgiving waters of the Solent and the sinking of the king’s pride to its dark depths. Thomas stays at his post in Portsmouth, repairing and rebuilding the houses that were fired by the invading French, overseeing the refitting of the ships that were damaged in battle, sending down swimmers to see if they can salvage anything from the warship as she settles into her last berth. He cannot come to court; I don’t hope to see him. He writes privately to the king and Henry shows no-one the letter.
People think that the king is ill again, that perhaps his leg has opened up or the fever that shakes him four times a year has come back. But I know what is wrong: he is sick to his heart. He has seen a defeat, an undeniable defeat, and he cannot bear it.
This is a man so sharp with pride that he cannot hear contradiction. This is a man who will play both sides at once to make sure that he wins. This is a man who from a boy has never been refused. And, in addition to all of this – here is a man who cannot see himself as anything but perfect. He has to be the very best. King Francis of France was his only rival; but now Francis and all of Europe are laughing at the English navy, which was supposed to be so mighty, and at our famous flagship, which sank as soon as she set sail. They are saying that the king piled so many guns on her that she was as fat and as clumsy as he is.
‘It wasn’t that,’ he says to me shortly. ‘Don’t think that.’
‘No, of course,’ I say.
‘Of course it was not.’
He is like an animal in a trap, twisting and turning against his own pain. He grieves more for his hurt pride than for the drowned men. He has to rescue his self-regard. Nothing is more important than that; no-one is more important than that. The ship can sink into the silt of the Solent as long as the king’s pride can be salvaged.
‘There was nothing wrong with the ship,’ he says another night. ‘It was the fools of the gunners. They left the gunports open after firing.’
‘Oh, was that what happened?’
‘Probably,’ he says. ‘I should have left Thomas Seymour in command. I am glad that fool Carew paid with his life.’
I swallow a protest against this harsh judgement. ‘God save his soul,’ I say, thinking of his widow who saw her husband drown.
‘God forgive him,’ Henry says heavily. ‘For I never will.’
The king talks to me every night about his ship. He cannot sleep without persuading me that it was the fault of others, fools or villains. He can do no other work. Most of the Privy Council go back to Westminster ahead of us, and Charles Brandon, Henry’s old friend, asks permission to go quietly home with his wife, Catherine.
‘He should have warned me,’ Henry says. ‘Of all the people in the world Charles should have warned me.’
‘How could he know?’ I ask.
‘He should never have let her sail if she was overloaded with men,’ Henry bursts out in sudden anger, his face blazing, a vein in his temple bulging like a thick worm under his skin. ‘Why would he not know that she was overloaded? He must have been careless. I shall call him back to court to explain himself. He was commander on land and sea: he has to take responsibility. It was not my plans that were at fault, it was his failure to execute them. I have forgiven him everything, all my life, but I cannot forgive him this.’
But before the messenger summoning Charles back has even left the palace, we hear from the Brandon household that he is ill, and then a horseman thunders up the London road from Guildford and says that he is dead. The king’s greatest and longest-surviving friend is dead.
It is the last blow of a terrible summer. The king is inconsolable. He locks himself into his room and refuses all service. He even refuses to eat. ‘Is he sick?’ I ask Doctor Butts when they tell me that the monstrous dinner has been sent back.
He shakes his head. ‘Not in his body, God keep him. But this is a great loss to him. Charles Brandon is the last of his old friends, the only friend from his childhood. It is like losing a brother.’
That night, even though my bedroom is three rooms away from the king’s chamber, I hear a terrible noise. It is a scream like a vixen makes at night, a howl so unearthly that I forget that I despise empty ritual, and I cross myself, and kiss my thumbnail and say, ‘God bless and keep me!’ There is another and another, and I jump out of my bed, snap, ‘Stay there!’ to my companion, and run into my empty presence chamber, through the king’s presence chamber, his privy chamber, his inner chamber, to his bedroom door, where the guard stands impassive. But behind the door I can hear heartbroken sobbing.
I hesitate. I don’t know whether to go forward or back. I don’t even know if I should tell the guard to knock for me, or try the door to see if it is locked from the inside. I don’t know if it is my duty to go to him and remind him that Charles Brandon will have died in his faith and will be waiting in purgatory, certain of his ascent to heaven on the uplifting vapour of expensive Masses, or whether I should leave the king to his monstrous grief. He is sobbing like a heartbroken child, like an orphan. The sound of it is terrible.
I step forward and I try the handle. The guard, his face completely blank as if his master is not blubbering only yards away, steps to one side. The handle turns but the door does not yield. He has locked himself in. He wants to be alone in the churning ocean of his grief. I don’t know what I should do and, judging by the blank face of the yeoman of the guard, he does not know either.
I go back to my own room, close the door and pull the covers over my head, but nothing can muffle the loud wailing. The king screams out his heartbreak all night long, and none of us, not in his rooms or mine, can sleep for his grief.
In the morning I dress in a dark gown and go to chapel. I am going to pray for the soul of Charles Brandon and for wisdom to help my husband, who has broken under this last loss. I take my place on the queen’s side and look across to the royal throne. To my surprise Henry is already there, in his usual place, signing papers for business, looking over petitions. Only his strained red-rimmed eyes betray his emotional vigil. Indeed, of the two of us, I show more signs of sleeplessness, with heavy eyes and a pale face. It is as if he burned away all his grief and fear in one night. As we finish the prayers and say ‘Amen’ he beckons to me. I go round to his side with my ladies following and we leave the chapel together, walking across the courtyard towards the main hall, my hand tucked under his arm, as he leans heavily on a yeoman of the guard on his other side.
‘I will give him a hero’s burial,’ he says. ‘And I shall pay for it all.’
I cannot hide my surprise at his calmness, but he takes it as delight in his generosity.
‘I will,’ he repeats proudly. ‘And little Catherine Brandon need not fear for their sons’ inheritance. I shall leave them both in her keeping. I will not take them as my wards. They can inherit their father’s estate entire. I will even let her manage it till they are men. I will take nothing from them.’
He is cheered by his own munificence. ‘She will be glad,’ he announces. ‘She will be thrilled. She can come to me and thank me personally as soon as she returns to court.’
‘She’ll be in mourning,’ I point out. ‘She may not want to serve in my rooms any more. She may not want to come to court. Her loss . . .’
He shakes his head. ‘Of course she will come,’ he says certainly. ‘She would never leave me. She has lived in my keeping since she was a girl.’
I say nothing in reply to this. I can hardly tell the king that a widow might prefer to spend the very first days of her widowhood in prayer, rather than entertaining him. Usually, a widow keeps to her house for the first three months, and Catherine will want to be with h
er fatherless boys. But then I realise: he will not know this. Nobody told him to wait before summoning me on the death of my husband. He would not imagine that anyone might not want to be at court. He has never lived anywhere but court, he has no idea of a private life or tender feelings that are not watched by the world. Within days of the death of my husband, he commanded me to court to play cards with him and flirt with him. Only I can stop him putting this burden on Catherine.
‘Perhaps she would rather stay at her home, at Guildford Palace.’
‘No, she would not.’
Nan comes to me one evening, long after dinner, when the court is closed down for the night and I am ready for bed. She nods to my lady-in-waiting, dismissing her from my bedroom, and takes a seat by the fireside.
‘I see you have come for a visit,’ I say drily, taking the seat opposite her. ‘D’you want a glass of wine?’
She gets up and pours us both a glass. We pause for a moment to savour the scent and taste of the deep red Portuguese wine and the light clarity of the Venetian glasses. Each glass, each perfectly blown glass, is worth a hundred pounds.
‘What would Mother say?’ Nan asks with a little smile.
‘Don’t take it for granted.’ I can quote her at once. ‘Don’t let down your guard. Never forget your family.’ And, more than anything else: ‘How is your brother? How is William? Does William have glasses as fine as this? Can’t we get some for him?’ We both laugh.
‘She always thought that he would be the making of the family,’ Nan says, sipping her wine. ‘She didn’t disregard us, you know. It’s just that she put all her hopes on William. It’s natural to look to the son and heir.’
‘I know. I don’t blame her. She didn’t know that William’s wife would betray him and our name, cost us so much and then have to be set aside.’
‘She didn’t foresee that,’ Nan agrees. ‘Nor this.’